was
its first bishop. Strategy had to be resorted to to secure the see for
him. The Count gave Pol a letter to take in person to King Childebat,
which stated that he had sent Pol to be ordained bishop and invested
with the see of Leon. When the Saint discovered what the letter
contained he wept, and implored the King to respect his great
disinclination to become a bishop; but Childebat would not listen,
and, calling for three bishops, he had him consecrated. The Saint was
received with great joy by the people of Leon, and lived among them to
a green old age.

In art St Pol is most generally represented with a dragon, and
sometimes with a bell, or a cruse of water and a loaf of bread,
symbolical of his frugal habits.

_St Ronan_

Of St Ronan there is told a tale of solemn warning to wives addicted
to neglecting their children and "seeking their pleasure elsewhere,"
as it is succinctly expressed. St Ronan was an Irish bishop who came
to Leon, where he retired into a hermitage in the forest of Nevet.
Grallo, the King of Brittany, was in the habit of visiting him in his
cell, listening to his discourses, and putting theological questions
to him. The domestic question must have been a problem even in those
days, since we find Grallo's Queen, Queban, in charge of her
five-year-old daughter. Family cares proving rather irksome, Queban
solved the difficulty of her daughter by putting the child into a box,
with bread and milk to keep her quiet, while she amused herself with
frivolous matters. Unfortunately, this ingeniously improvized _creche_
proved singularly unsuccessful, for the poor little girl choked on a
piece of crust, and when the Queen next visited the child she found to
her horror that she was dead. Terrified at the fatal result of her
neglect, and not daring to confess what had happened, the Queen, being
a woman of resource, closed the box and raised a hue and cry to find
the girl, who she declared must have strayed.

She rushed in search of her husband to St Ronan's cell, and upbraided
the hermit for being the cause of the King's absence. "But for you,"
she declared, "my daughter would not have been lost!" But it was a
fatal mistake to accuse the Saint, or to imagine that he could be
deceived. Sternly rebuking her, he challenged her with the fact that
the child lay dead in a box, with milk and bread beside her! Rising,
he left his cell, and, followed by the agitated royal couple, he led
the way to where the